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A comment on A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts. Parent comment

Re:A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts by alpha_squared on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @03:21PM (#23705342)
If I'm remembering right, Best Buy used to have "deals" on items that they "couldn't show you" until item was in cart. They may still be doing this. Best Buy's justification for it was that its agreements with manufacturers prevented it from displaying items below certain prices on their site. I'd never seen this elsewhere to know how pervasive these agreements were (or if Best Buy was just taking losses on certain items).
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Re:A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts by thaumasiotes on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @03:26PM (#23705410)
> Best Buy used to have "deals" on items that they "couldn't show you" until item was in cart. They may still be doing this. Best Buy's justification for it was that its agreements with manufacturers prevented it from displaying items below certain prices on their site. I'd never seen this elsewhere to know how pervasive these agreements were

This was also pretty common on Amazon.

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Re:A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts by hundchenkatze on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @03:42PM (#23705603)
Newegg still does this. Here's an item from their 4th of July sale.

https://www.newegg.com/p/2AM-008Y-00003?Item=9SIAEG2BMZ4393

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Re:A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts by Spivak on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @04:45PM (#23706414)
KitchenAid is famous for these kinds of agreements as a measure to ensure the public perception of their value doesn’t go down whenever there are sales.
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Re:A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts by randomdude402 on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @09:17PM (#23708911)
I used to build and manage ecomm sites. We had several manufacturers/brands that we had to agree not to openly display a retail price below a certain amount.

Incidentally, for almost every brand in our industry, that number was 1.8X listed wholesale.

We could sell for less, but not list a price of less. Implementing "add to cart to see price" was good enough at the time to keep them happy.

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Re:A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts by whoisjuan on Wednesday July 01, 2020 @03:51PM (#23705721)
They still do it.
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